Launching mplayer through ssh

[jney]

Hello,

I got 1 pc and 1 laptop.
i would like to launch mplayer on the pc with my laptop connecting in ssh. and control mplayer.

Is it possible ?

[Lars Noodén]

Yes, you can:

ssh -X -l jney  pc
mplayer /path/to/movie.mov

or

ssh -X -l jney  pc  "mplayer /path/to/movie.mov"

[jney]

hhmmm... actually i knew how worked ssh.

what i want to do is to launch a movie with mplayer on remote pc and be able to watch it on that remote pc.

[Lars Noodén]

what i want to do is to launch a movie with mplayer on remote pc and be able to watch it on that remote pc.

Ok. (BTW I fixed a typo above.)

You'll want to know what display to target. Usually it is :0.0 and it is set in the environment variable "Display". 'export' passes the value available to programs launched from that shell. The part before the colon is where a machine name could go, but that's left blank to mean local host, which if you are logged into the remote host is the remote host.

$ ssh -l jney  pc
export DISPLAY=:0.0
mplayer /path/to/movie.mov

There's not any good basic intro to X that I know of, but some info can be found in the Display Names section of the X manual. You can use the 'geometry' settings to place the new program in a particular area on the screen.

$ ssh -l jney  pc
export DISPLAY=:0.0
mplayer -geometry 400x300-1-1 /path/to/movie.mov

If you are using a key to connect to the remote machine, then you can pass the value of DISPLAY with the key itself. The section on the authorized_keys file format in sshd goes into a bit of detail. The server will have to allow PermitUserEnvironment for that user's group.

[jney]

Thank you Lars ! "export DISPLAY=:0.0" is what i was looking for.

i updated my zshrc to know if i'm connecting my terminal through ssh like it :

<pre>
if [ -n "$SSH_TTY" ]; then
export DISPLAY=:0.0
fi
</pre>